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Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey

The first thing to do is to admit that I’m a Downton Abbey fan. In fact, I’ve watched every episode twice. But in my defense, I counterbalance my Downton viewings with at least one hour spent with my chainsaw for every hour tuned into Masterpiece Classic.

One of the first things one notices, if one is a regular viewer of BBC productions, is that Downton is unusually ideologically and religiously balanced. One of the other effects one notices when one watches a lot of BBC is that one starts referring to oneself in the third rather than the first person. But one digresses…

If the viewer is expecting vintage BBC, Downton is full of surprises. This is not PG Wodehouse, with Jeeves the butler easily thinking rings around his Lord. This is not Brideshead Revisted‘s take on the upper classes, packed with alcoholic elders and simmering, repressed homosexuality amongst their offspring. It is not Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue with easy satiric shots at the hypocrisy which arises amongst the upper classes and their dysfunctional patter of religious and sexual…yes there it is again, repression.

The upper classes at Downton aren’t repressed, they’re restrained. They are not inbred, intellectually backward fools; they are intelligent and thoughtful. As a general rule they treat their servants well, care about their welfare and are generally respected by them in turn. They are, in a word, admirable. And for a period drama, that treatment is, in a word, surprising. And surprise is an essential element of compelling drama.

Films and series about Edwardian upper caste manners which portray the genteels uncharitably are boring, like the steady, unending (until one turns the switch off) hum of a fluorescent lamp. Downton Abbey is what George Gilder would call the entropic disruption to the background noise of revolt against the old world. To portray Lord and Lady Grantham as anything other than drunks, fools, hypocrites or either sexpots or sexual glaciers (or best of all, alternately both) is itself an act of cultural rebellion.

That’s arguably why the left is bashing Downton Abbey. TheNew York Times Art Beat column has reported that British critics are ‘torching’ Downton Abbey. Apparently Downton Abbey is snobbish, culturally necrophiliac (and if you don’t yet know what that word means, I suggest you leave it that way) and its popularity in the United States is due to the rise of the Tea Party movement and conservative opposition to the death tax. Even worse, creator Julian Fellowes is the holder of a Tory Peerage. Definitely not the right sort of people.

Now at first glance one might think that all of this goes a bit too far, dragging politics in where it has no proper place. But on second look, the left’s reaction is understandable. Julian Fellowes and they are on the opposite side of something. But it’s not that Fellowes is on the right, and they on the left. It is that Fellowes is in the middle and they on the far left. Downton Abbey is not an apologetic for the old order. It just gives them a fair shake.

Lord Grantham is admirable, yes, but wrong on many things. He makes a pass at one of the house maids. He flies off the handle at Bates unfairly. He foolishly squanders the family fortune on a bad investment. He expresses bigoted views towards Catholics (of which Fellowes, a practicing Catholic, must surely disapprove). Most tragically, he lets his upper class solidarity lead to a medical decision which may have led to the death of his daughter.

But, in general, Lord Grantham is a faithful, intelligent, decent and benevolent. The world has to change; he knows it, but he wants the world to change more slowly than it wants itself to change. His wife and children are not in general wiser than he (which marks the show as distinct from almost all TV advertisements set in families), but they are sometimes wiser than he…just like in life.

Fellowes seems to be saying that the old order had its day; it was good, though not perfect, during its time. It deserves a decent burial and a fond memory. And he also seems to be saying that change for change’s own sake is just as destructive as preservation for preservation’s own sake. Liberation of women, good. Growth of an all-encompassing set of regulatons, bad. My friend John Tamny (editor of this page) has given a good account of Fellowes’ political philosophy as expressed in his novels .

“I think the—well, not even the subtext, the supertext—of ‘Downton,’ is that it is possible for us all to get on, that we don’t have to be ranged in class warfare permanently—that for the general public, the fact that people are leading different lives with different economic realities and different expectations is perfectly cope-able with.”

“If you can’t deal with that,” he continues, “then your life would be unlivable. And I think politicians try to encourage us to think in a hostile sense [of] people who have a different circumstance to our own. Which I find very unproductive and uncreative.”

So Downton Abbey‘s message is an anti-class warfare one. The fact is that the spirit of the critics is hard left, and maybe that’s why Downton Abbey makes them so angry, because the success of the series shows that this group does not speak for America.

It also shows something equally important to the future of our culture: that there is no inherent need for good TV to be left of center. Stories sympathetic to virtue, preservation of property and admiration of nobility and of wealth can be told beautifully and to wide audiences, and I suspect they will be more and more in the future.

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Interesting, since that is what the old end of ideology folks said about the “radical” right in the late 1950s and 1960s. Guess humans never learn from jumping the gun omniscient pronouncements proving false before them.

I was unaware that critics that write for the NYT respresent everything “leftist”. I find this blog generalizes the Left as much as it generalizes the messages of Downton Abbey

Unbridled capitalism has major drawbacks, like workers being alienated from the fruit of their labor. Capitalism has no social contract between those who have, and those who have not. In Downton, the family has responsibility for those in their village and those who work in their home. If this was a factory of the same time period, you would have a much more Charles Dickens view of this era in England.

In a sense Fellows is saying that loyalty works both ways. He is saying we have a responsibility to each other. What is best about Downton is these social contracts. Now there is nothing more Leftist than that in my opinion. And I consider myself FAR left.

I would read the book The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and then think about how Marxist Downton is portrayed.

It’s interesting, the far left and the traditional right have a lot more in common than they think. They both have the same realizations, but where one rages against the small injustices, the other celebrates the remarkable fact that we can carve out our own little patch of order in such a chaotic universe.

Pity, though, none of them realize that you can be as happy as you want, but if you have a grossly inefficient economic system, your society is as doomed as it is if everyone’s an alienated profit-seeking automaton. You need a balance between capitalist efficiency and conservative (or leftist) collectivism.

I’m sorry, but the idea that loyalty, a social contract, and pride in labor is unique to Marxism (or any variety of Leftism) is nothing but a narcissistic conceit. Unfortunately, this and others are so pervasive among contemporary leftists that communication has become impossible. Nothing can be heard way up top the intellectual and moral Mt. Olympus except the sound of your fellow travelers’ flatus vocis.

Left-ism, Right-ism? How about Idealism? I just started watching this year (which means I had to catch up on Season 1 & 2). Having a very philosophical bent, what I see in Downton Abbey is that it showing us how we COULD be: respectful, courteous, responsible, tolerant, and most especially, balanced. I personally think we Americans love them because they touch our depths, touch who we really are. It is the character qualities in this fiction that I value, in the same way I valued Les Miserables when I first read it as a youngster. It gave me something idealistic to aspire to. I try to look at the goodness in it so I can recognize it in myself.

Most of the criticism of Dowton Abbey is aesthetic. Many criticise Downton’s soapiness. Others criticise Fellowes’s writing noting the many implausibilities that crop up in the show again and again. So does Fellowes tendency for piling on the deus ex machinas (Matthew is gorgeous, Matthew can walk, Matthew’s inheritance saves the manor) make him a conservative (really liberals of the laissez faire variety) or a liberal (really a liberal of the social insurance variety) or both? So does Downton’s soapiness make it liberal, after all liberal Dickens wrote soap, or conservative, or both?

By the way, echoing, it is hard for me to take an article seriously that goes on and on about the BBC but fails to mention that Downton is an ITV show, not a BBC show.

And oh yeah, Downton has its anti-BBC conservative defenders of the faith such as those folks at the even more unfair and unbalanced than Fox Daily Mail online and off…